perfidy

Ouch. Johno gets Mitt. Buckethead gets Joe. I get Hillary. One of these choices is not like the other two.

Why? Well, Mitt's a serious guy with a serious reputation among a fairly small subset of serious people who don't otherwise know too much about him, as Johno's undressing of him might indicate. He's not widely or well known, but Mitt has a vocal support group, and will do fine until the heat reaches room temperature in a national campaign. At that point, he's toast. Which is hard to do at room temperature, and don't ask me how long it took me to find that out.

Joe? He's famous for the same things that make him infamous, as Buckethead's clearheaded yet evenhanded rant exposes. There's a chance that he's a decent guy, underneath his hugely irkssome and noticeable but ultimately unimportant flaws. The fact that he can't seem to keep anyone's words from coming out of his cakehole, let alone his own, seems even more damning than the fact that he also has a history of not caring whose words he's using.

Easy targets, the both of them.

Not so, Hillary Clinton. Ms. Clinton is far more broadly known than either of the other two, and is still the frontrunner by a wide margin in the Democratic Party field. (See Mar 29 2007 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll). In that poll, Mitt Romney is tied for fourth place (at 6%) in the Republican ranks. He's tied with a guy who's not even sure he's running (Gingrich), a guy who, if he runs, would be a very interesting candidate and among the most (simultaneously) intelligent and arrogant candidates we've had to choose from in recent memory. Perhaps worse, Mitt's also trailing a guy in third place who wasn't even included in the poll until the March 29th issue, a man who has only recently entered the collective imagination for the presidency - Fred Thompson, at 9%. Fred's a guy who may still not run due to lack of energy, desire, or freedom from "indolent lymphoma". Worse yet for Fred's supporters, he's a guy who may even be too late to successfully run. And yet Mitt's still sniffing his exhaust. Like I said, easy pickings, both Mitt & Joe. 

Hillary, on the other hand, at 36%, finds favor with more Democratic voters than those for Barack Obama and Al Gore combined. She may be one of the most polarizing figures in national politics since, well, since George W. Bush, but she's not someone who can be trivialized or taken lightly. And yet, that's my task here. Since this is stream of consciousness composition, I may find I've started and ended the trivialization with the picture above, one of many such candid photos that, if you pick the right frame from your choices, can make anyone look like they've got a ferret up their skirt. Pant-suit. Whatever.

Ms. Clinton is the other half of the most politically adept, yet managerially sloppy and morally "flexible", presidencies in my lifetime. I've often wondered whether she is, in raw intelligence, the smarter of the two, and a case can be made that perhaps she is. In the alternative, she's surely not far behind Mr. Clinton in intelligence. In political finesse, he has her beat by a country mile, but she'd surely have access to his gifts in that area during a national campaign. He owes her that, at a minimum, just for the dry-cleaning bills paid.

The political tactics that the Clintons, then and now, have been able to muster are brazen beyond belief. That's politics, however, and tells me more about what they're able to do to get her elected (anything required) than it does about their character (sketchy as all hell, just like all other politicians from either party). As a for instance, this, from HRC's Wikipedia page (provenance unknown, as always):

Former Bill Clinton fundraiser and ally David Geffen spoke out against Hillary Clinton in an interview with Maureen Dowd, stating that Clinton had no trouble lying and was overproduced and overscripted.^[20] In response, the Clinton campaign attacked Geffen and the candidate that he is supporting for President, Barack Obama, charging that Geffen's comments reflected on Obama negatively and that Obama should return Geffen's money.

That's so Machiavellian that not only wouldn't I have reacted the way the Clintons did, I am incapable of having even considered it. If Barack Obama did anything other than laugh so hard he coughed up his lunch, I'd be hugely disappointed. But the story had the desired effect - deflection of tarnish on Bill Clinton's, and by extension, Hillary Clinton's, control of his network of allies.

Not that this is meant to be a post about him, but everything about Bill Clinton, the good and the bad, can be see as indicative of how Hillary will act as she moves her campaign forward. Sometimes the comparisons are parallels, but far more often, you'll find that they're opposites. When Bill Clinton was getting the snot kicked out of him by a rabid subset of the American body politic, it wasn't he who invented the term "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" - it was Hillary. This, of course, was after he'd be catting about with the porcine intern, a fact about which Hillary couldn't plausibly have been ignorant. That sort of "Hey! Look over there!" defense isn't taught in grad school, as far as I know - it comes from a deep seated willingness to do whatever it takes to take and hold power. Bill was such a bad-ass smooth talker that he really didn't need to care about things like his reputation. If Joe Klein's faux-novelization of the 1992 presidential campaign, Primary Colors, is any indication, Hillary wasn't willing to rely on people forming their own impressions, unguided, of the Clintons, and had the same focus on the result, damn the impediments, even back then.

Her stewardship of the attempt at nationalized health care, in 1993, points to another polar opposite tendency between she and her husband. He was a consummate politician - a smooth talking pragmatist who, love him or hate him, had the gift of making many people listen to, if not agree with him. Hillary? Not so much. When the firestorm started after her foray into health care policy, Professor Martha Derthick (quoted in a 2006 George Will WaPo op-ed) wrote:

In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naiveté . . . with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.

Polar opposite of Bill? Yeah. Shrill? Pretty much.

Are her actions from the 1990s useful for predicting her likely trajectory in the 2008 Presidential campaign? Not completely. Some of the political wisdom of her husband has clearly sunk in since her initial campaign for her NY Senate seat. She's matured politically, and can, at times, seem positively statesmanlike. The risk remains, however, that she'll let out the shrildabeest. Two issues seem ripe for such a result.

First, she's called "off limits" any discussion of her relationship with Bill. I'm instinctively sympathetic to that request, not least because I'm no fan of reality TV, as I don't like to see people humiliated purely for entertainment purposes. According to James "The Lizard" Carville, in a December 2006 WaPo piece:

Despite all that, the subject of the marriage is too hot to handle. "It's uranium-242," said longtime Clinton adviser and friend James Carville, earlier this year. "You pick that stuff up and it'll blow up in your face . . . I'll talk about anything. But I ain't gettin' near anybody's marriage, especially the Clintons.' "

He's right. But the media and her opponents aren't likely so soft-hearted to leave this issue alone, and a real test of her ability to play on the big stage will be the manner in which she enforces her self-declared ban on this topic.

Another touchy spot is evident in the details of an LA Times article from Feb 18, 2007, entitled "GOP activists circling Clinton's campaign". In it, the actors discuss the tactics required to avoid a fate similar to that of John Kerry in the 2004 campaign:

Clinton has been publicly bracing for "Republican machine" attacks from the moment she launched her exploratory committee last month. Whether she can strike back quickly may prove crucial to winning over Democratic primary voters looking for assurance that she can survive a bruising general election and Swift-boat-style attacks. 

"For Democrats, there's a strong sense this time around that they can't allow those same tactics to define Democratic candidates," said Democratic media consultant Jim Margolis.

If Ms. Clinton responds to "swift-boat style attacks" in the same was as Kerry did, she's toast. Swiftboating, you see, isn't slander or libel, as the LA Times and others who use the epithet would have you believe. As it applied in Kerry's case, assertions of fact were made by people close to him during his days in Vietnam, and he had a chance to respond. He largely failed to do so, and instead chose to whine about how unfair it all was. Swiftboating, then, is better defined as being put in a position where it's easier to whine than it is to rebut, respond, or explain the inconvenient facts because they're not rebuttable.

Partly because her opponents in this regard, such as StopHerNow, seem so unhinged, I don't think Ms. Clinton will be subject to the sort of factual expose and undressing Kerry begged for by his murky claims to heroism, and as a result, her best bet will be to respond only enough to such attacks that she can be seen to be responding, but not fully engaging, as it's beneath her. Claims that she's a rabid left-winger don't ring true. So what if, as StopHerNow says, she's left of her husband? He was really quite a centrist, believe it or not, and one could be to his left without being too awfully offensive. But as an apparent control freak, Hillary may not be able to stay above the fray, and that seems a risk she needs to mitigate.

One last slug in this already-overlong post, and perhaps the elephant in the room for Hillary, from that same December 2006 WaPo article entitled "The President in the Room", and an item that cements this as not just a Hillary campaign, but a Hillary and Bill campaign:

Yes, Bill can deliver political superstardom. He's a razor-sharp political strategist. He knows the institution of the presidency. His fundraising chops are unrivaled. All that is well and good -- perhaps too good, according to a September CNN poll, which showed his favorable rating higher than hers, 60 percent to 50 percent.

[wik] Other possible negatives? One word: "cankles" Two words: "pants suits"